The Mystic Chords of Memory

What does it mean to assimilate today? To naturalize or to neutralize? For previous generations, the American melting-pot ideal offered foreigners and minorities the choice to be either dusky Horatio Algers or strange Queequegs, though it eventually became clear that conforming minorities resembled Alger less than Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and that ethnic holdouts might be branded as a Bigger Thomas.

If the passion for adaptation still runs hot in American culture, Ellison’s prayer, at the end of his great novel--that “diversity is the word .... America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain”--has more purchase now than it did when those words were published in 1947. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the later rise of multiculturalism have promoted a laissez faire vision of American identity, but the question of how hyphenated nationals fit into the union remains a pressing one. What is this process of making and maintaining an “ethnic American” character?

In a smart and well-written autobiography of her Peruvian American heritage, “American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood,” Marie Arana shows that it is an effort of memory and of the imagination.

Arana is the child of a Peruvian father and an American mother and lived in her paternal homeland until, at adolescence, she moved with her parents to New Jersey in 1959. Faced with what she deems “the palsy of a double soul,” she calls upon the consolations of memory, nurturing her recollections of Cartavio, Peru, where her father managed sugar factories owned by the American outfit W.R. Grace: “The corridors of my skull are haunted. I carry the smell of sugar there. The odors of a factory--wet cane, dripping iron, molasses pits--are up behind my forehead, deep inside my throat .... I am always surprised to learn that people do not live with memories of fragrance as I do.”

And she retains more than vivid memories of fragrance: Arana renders the landscape and people of 1950s Peru in X-ray detail. She describes “the crow of the cock at dawn, the cooing of mourning doves.” Cartavio is an “oasis of cement, iron, and sugar”; a witch, who once told her brother’s fortune, had braids that “undulated like snakes”; the land she trod is made of “life’s dust, desiccated flowers, excrement, crushed butterflies, stillborn babies, winged monsters.”

There may be a tendency to read “American Chica” as a kind of exotic travelogue, but it is less a holiday guide than a handbook on how to resist the amnesiac effects of time and American culture. It would be so easy to succumb to the sweet delusions proffered by Elizabeth Arden and Gap ads that would have you forget your essential funkiness, racial or otherwise, but Arana reacts to these temptations with an almost obsessive excavation of her youth.

She tells us of digging with her brother through the ruins of a pre-Colombian adobe fortress, searching for gold but discovering only rodent skeletons and human skulls. She describes playing cowboys and Indians under the watch of their indio servants. And then there are all the superstitions she inherits, the witch stories and ghost tales and folklore about “life force” and “power of destruction,” which may come across as a slice of strange fruit unless you too were raised in the hothouse of the Latino imagination. Even at page 232 of a 320-page book, she’s still recalling conversations she had when she was 9, though her goal of resisting the erasure of her “Peruvianness” comes through clearest when she tells the story of how she traced her lineage to the infamous rubber baron Julio Cesar Arana.

Julio Arana spent the first decades of the 20th century building an empire out of the Amazon, cultivating Para rubber and marketing it to the United States and Europe, though his fortunes were cut short by revelations that the export was cultivated by Indian slaves who were being tortured and murdered by his henchmen. The author’s family, including her grandfather, Dr. Ingeniero Victor Manuel Arana Sobrevilla, an agoraphobic who confined himself to the top floor of his home, had always denied a blood tie to Julio. As an adult, Arana traced Julio’s line to hers while on a fellowship at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and discovered that her grandfather disowned the relation out of shame. She concludes that the cost of this denial was his own mental health and that the sins of blood and disavowal were also visited upon her bewildered and alcoholic father, who “reached for another life altogether,” as well as upon her own “divided” self.

Thus, Arana’s fascination with her past is not only a rebellion against a homogenizing United States; it flows from the conviction that a failure to come to terms with her history will have fateful consequence. One closes the book with the notion that forgetting “where you come from” not only discourages race pride but also entails a horrifying risk. Assimilation requires that the immigrant blend in with majority culture, and amnesia may play more of a role in this process than we would like to believe, but Arana’s stories contain the caution that to lose one’s past is to lose one’s self.

Still, there is no master recipe for how to fuse these foreign and American identities. Although there’s been a lot of ink spilled over the hyphenated American, the specific strategies for creating and keeping that self-image haven’t been given as much attention as they might deserve. Arana demonstrates that the imagination plays a large role here, as well it must. Growing up in New Jersey in the ‘60s, she had few Peruvian American models to emulate and so built her own, using her considerable creative talents.

For this construction is a creative endeavor, and ethnic American identity can take any form. While reading “American Chica” I thought of the music of black Americans whose observations on the identity struggle ranged from the elegance of Miles Davis’ “Bye Bye Blackbird” to the rancor of Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of our national anthem.

Arana takes the latter path, writing more from the breach than the bridge. It is the image of doubleness she returns to, again and again. “[B]y the time I was grown,” she writes, “I knew there were two women I could be--the Latina or the gringa--and that at every juncture I would need to choose one.” “I was divided.” “If I could feel both gringa and Peruvian, it was because I juggled two brains in my head.” She even identifies her job as the literary editor of the Washington Post with her American self, contrasting it with the Latina inside of her who “burns incense, prays on her knees to the Virgin, feels auras, listens for the spirits of the dead.”

Her heritage gives her a Janus-like perspective, but sometimes the effort of juggling her two souls can leave her exhausted. In the middle of the autobiography, she describes her first trip to the United States in 1956, when she visited relatives in Wyoming and learned a lesson about herself. She discovered there “a part of me--a very un-Peruvian part--that wants to run. Leave. Go .... [O]ut West .... a big sky was everywhere. Little wonder a spirit yearned to move on.”

In Arana’s eyes, then, we have not reached the point at which we can recognize difference and “let it so remain.” Assimilation might continue to require a rejection of the past that could make you crazy, yet staying brown has its own costs too. And this is where the book becomes the most difficult and true: Despite the solace of memory and the aid of imagination, Arana still connects assimilation with oblivion, but she has the guts to admit that there are some days when she wouldn’t mind trying it. *